Winter Olympics women’s snowboarding slopestyle final was failure by design

Our focus should have been on the world’s best female snowboarders throwing down their best stuff, not on how the wind prevented them from doing so.

The first sign of trouble was the cancellation of the women’s slopestyle qualifying round on Saturday afternoon (Korea Time).

After the completion of the men’s slopestyle final on Saturday afternoon, event organizers made the decision to cancel the women’s qualifier due to the strong crosswinds whipping the course. It meant that instead of 12 women advancing to the slopestyle final, all 27 riders in the field moved on.

The format of the final was as a result changed from three runs, which would have been new to the 2018 Winter Games, back to the two-run final we saw in the 2014 Sochi Games.

And it was a disaster.

Quite simply, the slopestyle final should not have gone on as scheduled Monday afternoon (Sunday night, Eastern Time), as it both subjected riders to dangerous crashes and undermined the overall integrity of the event.

Pretty much everyone — viewers and snowboarders alike — seemed to realize that save for the jury. Meanwhile, the FIS representatives on the alpine skiing jury canceled the women’s giant slalom event on the same day due to the same conditions.

While snowboarders had plenty of praise for the creativity and flow of the Phoenix Snow Park slopestyle course, they also remarked on its difficulty.

The course was designed to be challenging even in the best of circumstances, but in high winds? Forget it. This was failure by design.

The slopestyle final saw competitors attempt 50 runs. Of those, an incredible 41 ended in either a crash or the riders having to abort a jump due to strong headwinds.

At the very least, the IOC should consider itself lucky that the conditions didn’t affect the gold medal outcome. Jamie Anderson, defending Sochi 2014 slopestyle champion, is the best female snowboarder in the world, and she proved that again when she took gold after clearly putting together the best run.

But it’s unfair that Anderson’s remarkable achievement will come with an asterisk. Were her competitors able to challenge her to the best of their ability?

One athlete who will always have to wonder what if is Canada’s Spencer O’Brien. O’Brien, who won gold in slopestyle at the 2013 FIS World Championships, fell on her first jump and then had to bail on the jump on her second run when a huge gust of wind swept through just as she approached the takeoff.

There was a tense moment in which the jury deliberated whether O’Brien would earn another run as, simultaneously, Anderson was informed she had the gold medal locked down, but ultimately O’Brien’s medal hopes became yet another victim of the wind.

“It was horrible,” O’Brien, who was a favorite to medal, said after placing 22nd per The Wall Street Journal. “I hope everyone knows that this isn’t a true representation of women’s snowboarding.”

The FIS certainly didn’t make things better with an official statement after the disaster. “The first priority for FIS is the safety of the athletes and FIS would never stage a competition if this could not be assured,” the organization claimed.

The FIS also said “the nature of outdoor sports also requires adapting to the elements.”

Apparently that only applies to snowboarding, a discipline that has long felt like an afterthought for the FIS and, for that matter, the Olympics. Alpine skiing? Not so much.

Next: Women's snowboarding slopestyle final results

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